Comment 6 for bug 224264

In Ubuntu 10.10 maverick meerkat tesseract-eng package is correctly installed installing tesseract so this bug is FIXED.

@Kat Amsterdam : I think that your problem is a different one and not related to this bug.
Howewer try to see if in the directory reported by your problem there is the right file.
cd /usr/share/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/
ls -al

In my case launching tesseract file.tif file.txt -l it
give me same error
So I've checked if it.unicharset was present in /usr/share/tesseract-ocr/tessdata/ folder and I've found that this file is named ita.unicharset.
Launching tesseract file.tif file.txt -l ita works great :)